1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording method for recording images by ejecting ink by an ink-jet method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various methods have been proposed for image recording methods for recording color images in recent years. However, in all of these methods, there are still demands on the quality levels of recorded objects, for example, in relation to quality of image, texture, and curling properties after recording.
The ink-jet technique has been applied for office printers and household printers, and is recently increasingly being applied in the field of commercial printing. In the commercial printing field, printed sheets are required to have an appearance similar to that of general printing paper, rather than a surface that completely blocks penetration of ink solvent into the base paper such as that of a photograph. However, when a solvent absorption layer of a recording medium has a thickness from 20 μm to 30 μm, the ranges of properties such as surface gloss, texture and stiffness are limited. Therefore, the application of ink-jet techniques in commercial printing has been limited to, for example, posters and forms, for which restrictions on surface gloss, texture, stiffness and the like are tolerable.
Furthermore, a recording medium for exclusive use in ink-jet recording is expensive since it is provided with a solvent absorbing layer and a water resistant layer, and this is also a factor that limits the application of ink-jet technology in the field of commercial printing.
As an ink-jet recording method for forming high quality images, a number of image recording methods in which a liquid composition for improving images is used in addition to an usual ink-jet ink, and the liquid composition is deposited on a recording medium prior to the ejection of the ink-jet ink, have been proposed (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (JP-A) Nos. 9-207424 and 2006-188045). In these methods, the components of the ink-jet ink are aggregated on the surface of paper under the action of the fixing component in the ink, and thus the ink is fixed before dullness or bleeding occurs.
There is also disclosed a method for forming images by depositing a liquid composition which contains a cationic substance as a compound which makes the dye in the ink insoluble, on a region for image formation of ordinary paper by an ink-jet recording technique, and then jetting out a dye-containing ink on the area where the liquid composition has been deposited, also by an ink-jet recording technique, thereby performing printing (see, for example, JP-A Nos. 64-63185, 8-20159, and 8-20161).
There has also been disclosed a method for recording images by supplying an image recording accelerating agent on ordinary paper in an amount of 0.1 to 10 g/m2 using a coating roller (see, for example, Japanese Patent No. 3640369).